Newest Literature Essays

Though his poetry was largely ignored and dismissed during his time, John Donne is known today for being one of the best poets of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He gained this reputation by creating poetry that was different, that made...

The relationship between society and the individual is presented in powerfully differing ways in the novels Oryx and Crake, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Woman in the Dunes. While Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake shows how the...

Wallace Stevens, it seems, never spoke a great deal about his poem “Sunday Morning.” Because Stevens gives us very little insight into his own thoughts, it is important to examine the thoughts of other critics before analyzing a poem such as “...

Modernism as a literary genre began sometime before the First World War. It was, however, in the fires of this great conflict that the genre was forged and adopted its characteristics of disorientation and disconnection. The development of...

Serene landscapes and seductive relationships are key themes throughout Edmund Spenser’s work and are major assets to the plot and character development in “The Faerie Queene” and “Epithalamion.” Spenser’s early works are all in the pastoral...

Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegiac poem in memory of Abraham Lincoln. The poem tracks the narrator waiting to lay a sprig of lilac on the president’s coffin, the physical journey that Lincoln’s coffin takes...

In a discussion of Australian writers of the late nineteenth century, Gerry Turcotte writes: “Their exploration of the anxieties of the convict system, the terrors of isolated stations at the mercy of vagrants and nature, the fear of starvation or...

Although the characters’ distinctive individual stories are told in Act I of Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls, the overall effect is a cumulative chorus of women’s issues. The dinner scene in Act I establishes thematic foundations upon which...

The controversy surrounding Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange relates primarily to the central themes that are explored in both books. Nevertheless, the brutality and explicit expression that drench...

Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud offer bold critiques of human morality that greatly differ from the commonly accepted views of virtue and ethics. Both reject the idea of morality as an instinctive or natural element of human life. Rather,...

In his book On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche explores the relationship between suffering and guilt. Nietzsche argues that humans react to suffering by thinking that “someone or other must be guilty” (Nietzsche 94) for their...

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche advocates skepticism and rejection of many traditional beliefs and values. This dismissal of commonly accepted societal norms is evident in his attack on morality and virtue in section 21 of the book. In...

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche critiques the shortcomings and possibilities of modern science. In this critique, Nietzsche analyzes the limits of science, the ways in which science falsifies life, and the motivation for a scientific...

The Maltese Falcon at its core is a novel about people making up stories. Characters in the novel display a remarkable ability and willingness to lie. As each new character is introduced to the plot, a new host of lies is introduced as well. The...

Frankenstein is a novel characterized by an unusually layered narrative structure. Narrators exist within narrators, narratives are passed from one character to another, and a distinct gap exists between the telling of the story and the historical...

Shakespeare’s Othello is indeed a powerful and impressive figure who is tragically brought down by Iago, a villain who goes undetected through his great drive and intellect until the very end of the play. Despite his shortcomings -- of which a...

The subject of both Dennis Scott’s poem “Uncle Time” and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19 is time and its erosive quality. Both refer to the concept as a capitalized entity, emphasizing its powerful and often destructive nature primarily by way of vivid...

The novel Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes the life of a teenage girl, Kambili, who is raised in Nigeria. In the novel, Adichie uses two main settings to effectively describe the themes of freedom, silence, and repression. The...

Geoffrey Chaucer's poem “The Book of the Duchess” was written between the years 1369-1372. The poem is a product of Chaucer’s French period. This work was written for Chaucer's principal patron, John of Gaunt, after the death of his first wife,...

Langston Hughes was one of the most prolific writers of Harlem Renaissance era. Hughes's works are best known for the sense of black pride they convey and Hughes's implantation of jazz into his poetry. In 1926, Hughes wrote the critically...

In the novel Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, the title character faces the reality that she must grow up, detach from her parents, and establish an identity independent from that of her mother’s -- that the beautiful childhood she once had cannot...

One thing that Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis have in common is the aftertaste they leave in the reader’s intellectual palate. Unlike most authors, Endo and Kafka refuse to oblige the readers with a satisfying happy...

In the book The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, the lexical words of the author are in perfect harmony with the visual pictures he presents to the reader; the illustrations are often matched concretely with the words, and they both simultaneously...

Earle Birney’s poem “Anglosaxon Street” and Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan both present a powerful critique of modern life, though the former is delivered through sarcastic humor while the latter is portrayed through poignant emotions. Modernity in “...